Structured Procrastination

It makes sense to me. We all are procrastinators to some extent, why not exploit it?

All procrastinators put off things they have to do. Structured procrastination is the art of making this bad trait work for you. The key idea is that procrastinating does not mean doing absolutely nothing. Procrastinators seldom do absolutelynothing; they do marginally useful things, like gardening or sharpening pencils or making a diagram of how they will reorganize their files when they get around to it.

Structured procrastination means shaping the structure of the tasks one has to do in a way that exploits this fact. The list of tasks one has in mind will be ordered by importance. Tasks that seem most urgent and important are on top. But there are also worthwhile tasks to perform lower down on the list. Doing these tasks becomes a way of not doing the things higher up on the list.

The trick is to pick the right sorts of projects for the top of the list. The ideal sorts of things have two characteristics, First, they seem to have clear deadlines (but really don't). Second, they seem awfully important (but really aren't).

One personal experience with SP: On some weekends I have to finish 3 homework: Mirco, Macro and Metrics. The first two are not that time consuming, each would normally take me a few hours. Metrics is really a time sink so I put it off as much as possible. While putting off Metrics homework, I am quite motivated to finish off Mircro & Macro. And finallly when it comes to time I have to do Metrics homework, I use it again as decoy to really go over the notes and pick up really stuff, and at the last moment I can do it as quickly as possible since that homework is graded by effort instead of correctness. And that works out pretty well.